Tuesday, October 30, 2007

According to scriptwriting "formulas", one of the critical elements in the setup of a story is the central question.

The central question is simply what the story is about or what the problem is.

The story should ask a question in the setup that will be answered in the climax.

The central question should be revealed as early as possible. (This is particularly true for young readers. They don't want to have to keep reading and reading to find out what the heck the story is about. In fact, if you take too long to reveal the central question, they will stop reading and go watch Sponge Bob.)

The central question must be clear. (Again, if it is not clear, young readers will go watch Sponge Bob instead.)

Once the central question is raised, everything that happens in the story after that should revolve around or relate to that question.

The climax of the story answers the central question (e.g. solves the problem).

Thursday, October 25, 2007

There are certain expressions and phrases that I've used all my life and never thought twice about until I left the South and someone would tease me or comment about it. (I drive copyeditors crazy - they just don't "get" some of that Southern speak.)

One of those expressions is "might could" - as in: I might could go to the movies with you tonight. I'll have to ask my mama.

Last night I was reading One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty, and got a kick out of the following passage:

The school toilets were in the boys' and girls' respective basements....A friend and I were making our plans for Saturday from adjoining cubicles. "Can you come spend the day with me?" I called out, and she called back, "I might could."

"Who said MIGHT COULD?" It sounded like "Fe Fi Fo Fum!"

We both were petrified, for we knew whose deep measured words those were that came from just outside our doors. That was the voice of Mrs. McWillie, who taught the other fourth grade across the hall from ours.

...."If I ever catch you down here one more time saying MIGHT COULD...you'll be kept in every day for a week! I hope you both are sufficiently ashamed of yourselves."

Saying MIGHT COULD was bad, but saying it in the basement made bad grammar a sin. I knew that Presbyterians believed that you could go to Hell.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

I was at a school once where one of the teachers didn't want to read ME AND RUPERT GOODY to her class because of the "child abuse." I confess that I was taken by surprise when I was told that and had to think hard to even realize what she was talking about.

This is what she was talking about:

"Mama slaps them silly when they say that, leaving her red handprint on their cheeks. They start howling and holding their faces and she says, "Y'all hush up that bawlin' before I give you something to bawl about."

I thought a lot about that incident - wondering why it would have been a bad thing for children to hear that.

Not long after that, I was at a school discussing "show, don't tell" with some third graders. We were brainstorming ways that people show anger. A small and very spunky boy announced very matter-of-factly that one time his mother got mad at him for sloshing bath water onto the floor and she slapped him. (However, he prefaced that with "before my mom was in therapy....")

He literally used the word "slapped", not "hit".

His mother slapped him.

Naturally, it made me think once again about the issue of children reading about children being slapped by a parent.

Do we not want children to know that some children get slapped? If so, why not?

For the children who are slapped, do we not want them to read about it? If so, why not?

Okay, fast forward to yesterday. I wrote the following in my work-in-progress:

"Velma stomped over to Popeye and gave him a little whack on the arm when she asked him what in the world had gotten into him. Then another whack when she asked him if he had plumb lost his mind. And one last whack when she asked him if he was trying to worry her right into the grave."

Then, a few passages later:

"Popeye could tell that all she wanted to do in the whole world, at that moment, was find herself a rolled up newspaper and swat Starletta's skinny legs. But, of course, she couldn't. So she turned to Popeye and said, "Let's go."

I woke up during the night thinking about that.

My thought was this: Maybe I should change that.

Maybe Velma should just nudge him a little and not whack him.Maybe I should take out the rolled-up newspaper stuff.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

I am delighted to feature one of the artists who has so generously contributed to the Robert's Snow project to raise money for Dana Farber cancer research:

Brian Lies

Brian is an enormously talented artist, New York Times bestselling author, world's best blueberry scone maker, and a dear friend of mine. It is my honor to feature him today in conjunction with the Blogging for a Cure project to draw attention to the Robert's Snow online auction. (There are many more artists participating in this event, so please check them out.)

Brian has illustrated many books for children, including Finklehopper Frog by Irene Livingston (Tricycle Press)and the Flatfoot Fox series by Eth Clifford (Houghton Mifflin).

He has both written and illustrated the popular Hamlet books (Moon Mountain), and his most recent, the New York Times bestselling Bats at the Beach (Houghton Mifflin).

And now, let's hear from Brian:

How did you get involved with the Robert's Snow project?

I honestly don't remember. I'm a member of several illustrator listservs, and my guess is that somebody on one of the lists mentioned the Robert's Snow project. It sounded like a great thing to be a part of, and this is my third year of making a snowflake.

How did ten-year-old Brian answer the question: What do you want to be when you grow up?

Like many kids, my dream job shifted shape a lot. When I was growing up, lots of boys wanted to be astronauts (there weren't any American female astronauts at the time). I also wanted to be a fireman, an actor, a chemist (my Dad was a researcher), a paleontologist, and a herpetologist. It wasn't until I was in fifth grade that I even really thought about being an author. An author/illustrator, Harry Devlin, visited our school, and I was amazed that you could actually make a JOB out of writing and drawing--both things I loved to do.

What are some of your earliest memories of creating art?

I think my earliest memory is from preschool, making papier mache-covered balloon animals. I got in trouble because I was more interested in mooshing my hands around in the flour paste than actually finishing my project.

Another time, in first grade, we did line drawings on burlap and then embroidered the lines with blunt needles. My drawing was of a lion and a tree and I was proud of it, until the art teacher picked out some of my stitching and "fixed" it. There was a rule against drawing "lollipop trees," which was sad because that's how little kids see a tree--a stick and a blob on top of it. She hung my lion in the hallway and told me how nice it was, but I couldn't even look at it--it wasn't mine any more.

Tell us a bit about your college experience?

In college, I was studying for a "real" career--in psychology, or something equally worthy. I drew to let off steam, and took an art class for fun, but was irritated by "artier than thou" attitudes of the teacher and some of the students. In protest, I used socks and dried American cheese slices to create an assemblage for one project, and was horrified that during the in-class critique, only one student suggested that I was poking fun at the assignment. I found out that Brown students could cross-register at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), and took a class or two there. But then I started doing drawings for the college newspaper and realized that those illustrations were the best part of my week. A new idea hit me--I could become a political cartoonist! It combined my growing interest in politics, my love of drawing, and my hope to change the world.

During my senior year, I applied to 140 major metropolitan daily newspapers, creating 140 individual portfolios of my editorial cartoons. While my friends were getting acceptance letters from great companies, I collected rejection letters--141 in all (one Ohio paper sent me the duplicate form rejection letters on two consecutive days, as if to hammer the point home). My ideas were good, they said, but my drawing wasn't. I graduated from college with no job, and few prospects.

Your road to children's book publication in six (or ten or a hundred) easy steps?

Then I heard about an art school in Boston--the School of the Museum of Fine Arts--and it sounded like the perfect thing for me. I drew and painted for nearly three years, and during that time, called Jeff Danziger, the Christian Science Monitor's political cartoonist, to ask for advice. Jeff liked my drawings, and took me into the next room to meet Cynthia Hanson, designer of the Op Ed page, who took me on right then as a freelancer, to do editorial illustrations.

A year or so later, lightning struck. I was standing in a store in my neighborhood of Cambridge, MA, when the woman in line ahead of me turned around. She'd overheard me talking with a friend and asked, "Did I hear you say you're an illustrator?" I said yes, and she asked, "Have you ever done any children's illustration?" Again I said yes--I was working on a picture book at the time, and was hoping to send it to Houghton Mifflin, one of the biggest publishers in Boston.

It turned out that she was the art director at Houghton Mifflin, Susan Sherman--the very person to whom I was planning to send my story! We arranged a meeting for a portfolio review, and a month after that, she sent me my first book to illustrate--a black and white chapter book. I've worked with Sue now on a number of books, both at Houghton Mifflin and Charlesbridge Publishing, where she now works.

Any particular inspirations, heroes or mentors?

My first inspiration was Harry Devlin, when he visited my fifth grade library. Several of his books had been favorites when I was younger (THE WONDERFUL TREE HOUSE and THE KNOBBY BOYS TO THE RESCUE), and seeing the man who had actually made those books (with his writer wife, Wende Devlin) was astounding.

But I'm also inspired by the illustration-world mirepoix of NC Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish, for their color work, and Winsor McCay for his no-holds-barred imagination in "Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend."

Will you share with us the story behind your most recent published book?

BATS AT THE BEACH came about because my daughter, who was a 2nd grader at the time, saw a frost pattern in a guest-room window which she announced looked "like a bat, with sea foam." That sounded like a book to me--what would bats do at the beach? I liked the idea of inverting the typical day at the beach and seeing what it would look like at night.

Anything in the works at the moment?

I'm working on another bat book, BAT NIGHT AT THE LIBRARY, which is due to be published in fall, 2008. I'm having a lot of fun with it!

Any particular goals you have yet to accomplish?

There are lots of things I'd like to try, from wordless picture books to novel-length pieces, and anything in between. I like the idea of writing books for a variety of ages, so when kids decide they've outgrown my picture books, for instance, they could switch over to my chapter books. When I was a kid, I hated to realize that I'd finished all of my favorite authors' books there on the shelf. But if I could have learned that there was a whole NEW shelf, in another section of the library, with MORE books by those authors...that would have been great!

Anything you've learned along the way that you can share with newbies?

I think the most important thing is NOT to focus just on getting published, even though that's an aspiring author/illustrator's immediate goal. What's really important is craft--making your writing or drawing as strong as it can be. What's your weakest skill? Description? Dialogue? Drawing hands? Work on those. I think weaknesses are fairly easy to see in writing or drawings, and you're often judged not by what you do brilliantly, but by those weaknesses.

I think getting published is a lot like golf (which I don't play)--if you perfect your swing, the ball should go more or less where you want it to. Likewise, if you learn to tell stories in an original and compelling way, either in words or pictures, and hone your skills so that they're truly professional. . . you're going to get published. It may take a while, but you'll get published.

The other most important thing if you want to write or draw is to DO it, as regularly as you can. My ability to draw waxes and wanes. When I'm in the writing stage of a book and don't draw for several weeks, my drawing becomes terrible. It's only after drawing daily for a week or so that my skills return, and the mental muscles get back into shape. But it's important to build those mental muscles first--and the only way to do it is by spending time practicing.

(Note: I'll be featuring Brian Lies on Tuesday - so come back and check it out.)

Note to Blog Readers about Blogging for a Cure: When Jules of 7-Imp put out her call in September for bloggers to interview/feature artists who had created snowflakes for Robert’s Snow 2007 at their blogs, a number of artists had not yet sent in their snowflakes to Dana-Farber. As time was of the essence to get Blogging for a Cure underway, we worked with the list of artists whose snowflakes were already in possession of Dana-Farber. Therefore, not all the participating artists will be featured. This in no way diminishes our appreciation for their contributions to this worthy cause. We hope everyone will understand that once the list of artists was emailed to bloggers and it was determined which bloggers would feature which artists at their blogs, a schedule was organized and sent out so we could get to work on Blogging for a Cure ASAP. Our aim is to raise people’s awareness about Robert’s Snow and to promote the three auctions. We hope our efforts will help to make Robert’s Snow 2007 a resounding success.

One of the most critical elements of the setup of a story is the catalyst (sometimes called the inciting incident).

The catalyst begins the action of the story.

It is the moment the story begins. The reader now knows what the story is about.

The catalyst should come as early in the story as possible.

The strongest catalyst is an event or action, but it can also be situational (a series of situations that add up to reveal the story).

I'm a firm believer in jumping right into the story. The longer you take to let the reader know what the story is about, the more you risk losing her.

(Often, however, the reader needs to be grounded in setting and character before the story action begins. In those cases, the catalyst won't necessarily be in the first page or two - but a tad later. The operative word here is tad. You'll want to get the action going ASAP.)

During revision, take a look at your manuscript and see if you can literally point your finger to the very spot where the action of the story starts.

Then ask yourself if that spot is as close to the beginning as possible.

Next, take a look at everything that comes before that spot and ask yourself if it can either come later - or be deleted altogether.

At the FAME conference in Orlando, I got Jane O'Connor's (Fancy Nancy) gift basket and she got mine. So I got a cool wand that made magical noises when you waved it - and a feather fan. There's also a chocolate alligator there.

Now I'm home. Whew! A great trip but my pillow sure looked good last night.

I'm sitting in the lobby of the Comfort Inn in Tampa, Florida, getting ready to begin my last day of school presentations. Wow - these Florida folks know how to do it right!

I have a zillion pics but not time to post them yet.

Have to give a major shout-out to Librarian Extraordinnaire Dee Dee Schatzberg, who chauffeured me around endlessly and presented me with the most excited kids on the face of the planet. AND - she planned a lovely ceremony at her school's "Reading Garden", when they planted three bushes in my honor! How cool is that?

Hey - they can be Barbara Bush!

Off to FAME conference this evening (Florida Association for Media in Education.)

Okay, okay.... I confess: I probably wouldn't have read this book if I hadn't "met" Sarah Miller online.

There, I said it.

Why? I just don't read a lot of historical fiction. I'm a contemporary realistic fiction kinda gal. And there are so many books, so little time, and all that.

But I am so glad I did read it.

The girl can write.

First and foremost, her passion for the subject (Annie Sullivan) comes through loud and clear. I love that she took a subject she was so passionate about, researched the heck out of it, and then transported herself not just into the story, but into the person of Annie Sullivan.

Monday, October 8, 2007

Greetings from Florida. My first day of school visits started at the most beautiful elementary school ever. It was 80 years old and had so much character. Check out the tiles on these stairs, made by children (the tiles, that is...not the stairs.)

Me, yammering away about Fame and Glory in Freedom, Georgia (my book that is on the Sunshine Young Readers Award list):

Joan McClelland (left), librarian at Mabry Elementary in Tampa and Abby Russell (right), author event coordinator for Barnes and Noble, standing in front of the terrific welcome signs made by the students:

Some words of encouragement from a student:

Abby Russell (left) and me:

Welcoming words from a student:

One of the many drawings of Fame and Glory in Freedom, Georgia:

One class gave me a terrific book of poems they had made.

AND - another class made a banner about various writing elements they found in FAME AND GLORY IN FREEDOM, GEORGIA. I have some great photos of it and will post it at a later date.

About Me

I'm a children's book author.
My latest book is Wish. Others include The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester, The Small Adventure of Popeye and Elvis, Greetings from Nowhere, How to Steal a Dog,and Fame and Glory in Freedom, Georgia. In addition to being a six-time winner of the Parents Choice Award, my awards include the Massachusetts Book Award, the South Carolina, Kansas, and South Dakota Children's Book Awards, School Library Journal Best Books, Bank Street College Best Books, and ALA Notables. I've had books on over 38 state reading award lists.